Oracle Corp.’s push to move more of its business to the cloud paid off in its fourth fiscal quarter, and its shares benefited Monday afternoon.
The Silicon Valley giant crossed the top and bottom line with a sharp increase in revenue from cloud and local licensing ($ 18% more this year to $ 2.5 billion) and moderate gains in cloud services and licensing support revenue (3.% to $ 7.6 billion).
Oracle ORCL,
shares initially rose more than 9% after hours, after a 4.5% drop in the regular session to close at $ 64.07.
For the fourth fiscal quarter, Oracle reported net income of $ 3.2 billion, or $ 1.16 per share, compared to $ 4 billion, or $ 1.37 per share, in the year-end period. past.
Adjusted earnings, which exclude share-based compensation items and other items, were $ 1.54 per share.
Revenue rose 5% to $ 11.8 billion from $ 11.2 billion in the quarter last year.
Analysts surveyed by FactSet had estimated earnings of $ 1.37 per share on revenue of $ 11.6 billion.
“We have experienced a significant increase in demand for our cloud infrastructure business, which grew by 39% in constant currency. We believe that this increase in revenue indicates that our infrastructure business has now entered a phase of hyper growth, “CEO Safra Catz said in a statement.
Oracle did not issue first-quarter guidelines.
“The real story here is the impressive 39% growth. [Oracle’s] cloud infrastructure business, putting its growth more at the pace of market leaders [Amazon.com Inc.’s
AMZN,
] AWS i [Microsoft Corp.’s
MSFT,
] Azure, as well as Google GOOGL,
GOOG,
Daniel Newman, senior analyst at Futurum Research, told MarketWatch.
“Oracle’s outlook continues to look better; even in this tough market for technology, it could be argued that Oracle is one of the best bets,” Newman said.
Oracle shares have fallen 26% so far this year, while the S&P 500 SPX Index
has sunk 20% in 2022.